(3 of 3)
Finally, we are on the same side. I'm upstairs, Norah's downstairs. Hepburn has someone new in her sights. When dessert is slow in coming because Norah is waiting for the homemade Irish lace cookies to bake, Hepburn muses, "What do you think she is doing down there to that ice cream, making it?"
Hepburn still swims, "to be irritating," all year off Long Island Sound but points to a bum ankle that forces her to crawl over the rocks to get out of the water. "Imagine the obituary, actress drowns in six inches of water." Only for a second do I imagine this and ask, generally, about dying. "No fear. I love to sleep. I picture it as just a good long sleep." She likes being alone. "I have such a great family that I haven't had much need for friends. Guests come for dinner at 6 and have to leave by 8."
After her divorce, she was involved with the agent Leland Hayward and Howard Hughes, but it was Tracy "who was on to her," who gave up nothing for her and who consequently won her devotion. She stopped doing everything that irked him, even altered "qualities which I personally valued. It did not matter. I changed them." Despite making it safe for women to wear pants, she is not a have-it-all feminist on the subject of children and career. "You can't do both. It's a choice. If you want a career, which I did, why bring a child into the world who won't get the benefit of your total attention? You can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time."
Hepburn is no more introspective in person than she was in her off-the-top- of-her-head, sentence-fragment memoir. Hepburn does not like people who "make a fuss." When she found her 16-year-old brother dead, hanging from the rafters by bed sheets, she cried later because it was expected of her. The apparent suicide was never discussed. She waits until the last chapter to talk about Tracy, who she says initially believed the rumor that she was a lesbian. She says she never knew how he really felt about her and wonders now if she "should have straightened things out." He would have felt less guilt, and the divorce would have been "ennobling to ((Louise))." Regrets? Only that she did not become a writer because it is so easy. "No makeup. No costumes. I wrote in bed every morning. Whatever came into my head. Someone types it up, and you have a book. I have no idea what it says. I've never read it." This, like wearing an old green raincoat fastened with a big safety pin to auditions to show that she didn't care whether they liked her or not, is something of a pose. There is an audiotape of her reciting Me, so she has read parts of it at least once.
She suddenly stands. "You have enough, I'm sure." As is her custom, she leaves without saying goodbye.